Values campaign would elevate the debate

Penny Wong was insistent. The federal election in September would be about ''values''. During an appearance on ABC TV's Lateline on Wednesday night, the Finance Minister said so repeatedly.

''I think what will define the election is a question of values and priorities and plans,'' she said, trying to shape the political debate for the next nine months.

Again, when asked about the budget: ''I think you'll always see a Labor budget and Labor values in action in the decisions this government makes.''

Great stuff. Let's hope it happens because, if it does, we might finally have the debate that's been all but missing for 30 years.

During the Hawke-Keating-Howard years, if you tried to talk of values - other than amorphous ''family values'', the Anzac legend or Kokoda - you were a dewy-eyed idealist. Even worse, you were an ''ideologue'', cluttering the national conversation about labour market flexibility, deregulation or productivity, as if these were not, in their own way, ideological obsessions.

The discussion of state politics was even worse: triple-A credit ratings, federal-state relations and that gem ''public-private partnerships''.

In recent years, as the public tired of technocratic jargon, we submerged into platitudes unworthy even of a bumper sticker: ''prosperity'', ''initiative'', ''quality health care'', ''safe communities''. Ugh. As Ross Gittins suggests in his recent book, find me a politician who promises a poorer, sicker, lazier and more dangerous Australia and that will be interesting - and, frankly, more believable.

But a values debate suggests something deeper and, yes, potentially divisive (although there's nothing wrong with peaceful, if heated, disagreement). Barack Obama only really found his voice as a president when he ditched what the 2008 Republican Party vice-presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, called the ''hopey changey stuff'', and presented Americans with a stark choice. He was unafraid, finally, to say that he was on one side - and only one side - of the debate, namely higher taxes on the rich and salvaging the remnants of America's social security and public healthcare for seniors.

The closest Australia came to a values campaign was the 2007 federal election. Because Kevin Rudd described himself as an ''economic conservative'' with barely a cigarette paper's difference between himself and John Howard, the Canberra press gallery missed the values debate that WorkChoices represented. They mistook it for a mere policy difference and, for a few months, suggested it would be neutralised as an issue if Howard changed the ''no disadvantage test''. He did - and it didn't save his government because WorkChoices masked an almost philosophical argument over the work-life balance. How much power should you, or your employer, have over your life?

This year's campaign has the potential to become a genuine contest of values, reflecting deeper religious and humanist principles: who should have power, privilege and access in a society, and who should not? Do we rely on the state for help, on each other, or are we on our own? Do we invest in publicly provided goods or rely on individual initiative and entrepreneurship? What is bigger threat or asset: big government or big business, or this British concept of the ''big society''?

Interestingly, for the three major political leaders, religious faith is present in their lives or looms large in their histories. Julia Gillard may be an atheist now but, as Michael Madigan pointed out in a perceptive piece in The Courier-Mail in 2010, she is a ''cultural Baptist'', who ''won prizes for catechism, for being able to remember Bible verses'' while she attended Baptist Sunday School.

You can detect it in her injunctions about ''hard work'' and ''setting the clock early''. It might even explain her opposition to same-sex marriage.

Tony Abbott, caricatured as a doctrinaire Vatican-line Catholic, is actually a more complex Catholic. He defies easy categorisation. Part of him is a Christian Social Democrat, with a communitarian ethos, derived from his association with B.A. Santamaria. There is also that English Catholic sensibility about him, embodied in John Henry Newman, that emphasises conscience as much as doctrine.

The Greens leader, Christine Milne, opponent of the Australian Christian Lobby, spent her formative years in a convent school. She worked with the World Council of Churches and the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference as an adviser on environmental issues, reflecting the movement for ''creation care'' among Christians.

And Wong herself, who urged this campaign be one of values, is a Christian in the Uniting Church tradition.

A values-based campaign isn't a religious crusade, and shouldn't be. But this is the chance to elevate debate beyond the platitudes - ''prosperity'', ''fairness'', ''initiative'' - and the minutiae of the Gonski report or the Asian century white paper. It's a chance for leaders to articulate the stark choice of who wins, who loses, and whose side they're on.